>>6109602Just to make the whole experience even stranger, the crew of Searchlight, your orbiting Hawkeye, tell you they detected no radiation at all, despite being no more than 180 miles from the scene of the action, well above the radio horizon. The scream wasn't EW - the electronic interference had been an entirely local effect.
Given Gamma Flight’s experience with just one of the damn things, on top of their questionable fuel state and lack of air-to-ground weapons you decide it's probably better to recall them. But the aviators in question request permission to press on for another two hundred miles along the monster's last known heading. Despite your misgivings, you ultimately give them the go-ahead.
Though, after some further consideration, you give them permission to go noses-hot. It was past the time to be hiding. Your existence has been revealed. The jig is up, the news is out; now comes the masquerade, the dance of decoys and countermeasures and counter-countermeasures. The key will be to give the enemy an irresistible target and trick them into revealing their hand.
First things first, however, you need some proper eyes in the sky.
With a silent command, your orbiting Hawkeye radiates, illuminating everything there is to see across the northern Marshall Islands and a swathe of ocean larger than Texas. You take a moment to examine the tactical picture your Hawkeye was putting together, hoping against hope that it had discovered your foes-
And find you can only stare in astonishment. Because it. Can’t. See. You. Well, sort of. At 180 miles, both your little strike group and Prinz Eugen are vanishingly tiny points on the surface, contacts that the E-2’s computers might have discounted had the operators not both consciously changed the filters and known where to look. Being a living breathing land-walking aircraft carrier was one thing. But a stealth aircraft carrier? That was something that really drove the point home, in a manner you had long experience as a ship to understand. You’d experienced a literal *million-fold* reduction in radar cross-section or even more.
After a few minutes’ thinking, you decide to try something, and tell every airframe but Searchlight to shut off their directional data uplinks. As you concentrate, you find you can still talk to every aircrew, no emissions needed; even now you could feel not just Gamma Flight’s position and heading, as was being pushed to you by Searchlight, but also what the pilots and RIOs were seeing off their sensors. After a few minutes you give permission for the links to be restored.
Still, that was… you could conceivably conduct entire battles telepathically, zero emissions ever. The possibilities were limitless.
